Review of Sam Cheuk's Deus et Machina

Deus et Machina by Sam CheukI stopped to look at Sam Cheuk’s Deus et Machina at a small press show in London because it’s a beautiful book (as Baseline Press chapbooks are—lovely papers, hand-bound, a simple yet arresting cover design). I bought it though, because the strength of its voice caught at me even as I was just flipping through it. Lines like, “The mouth is a wound; where can pain expire if it’s stitched up?” wouldn’t let me put it back on the table without giving it a proper read. I laid down my money and read it twice before the show was over, twice more the next day.The poetry itself takes the form of an apostrophe to A. (which, it becomes clear, is a personification of Alcohol) and to Night and Desire. This mode of apostrophe is reinforced by the volume’s first epigraph, from Augustine’s Confessions, which is addressed to God, but which can be read quite differently in the context of Cheuk’s own apostrophe to Alcohol—“Oh, that You would enter my heart and make it intoxicated, so that I might forget all woes and embrace you, my only good.”This connection between Cheuk’s apostrophe to A. and Augustine’s apostrophe to God implies either (or both) how alcohol can take on the role of God or how God can take on the role of alcohol (entering the heart and becoming the only good, intoxicating the heart and covering woes). The ambivalence here (with respect both to God and to alcohol) opens into a larger question—not just of what it means for alcohol to be worshipped like God or for God to intoxicate like alcohol, but also of what it means for anything to become our intoxication, to become our only good.Interestingly, the form of the apostrophe itself becomes a kind of answer to this question, because while an apostrophe calls to one who is absent, it doesn’t attempt to fill this absence. The epigraph from Augustine is an excellent example of this ambivalence. It calls to an absent God, a God just out of reach, but its request is not that God be present. It doesn’t ask, “Oh, enter my heart.” It asks, “Oh, that You would enter my heart,” implying that God has so far chosen to remain at a distance. The apostrophe here marks a desire for God, but this desire is for a God that must remain at least in some respect absent.

It marks the distance of the absent one precisely to keep that distance, to keep the absent one at a certain remove.

Deus et Machina apostrophizes A. in a similar way. It calls for something that must remain always longed-for but unfulfilled, always desired but kept at arm’s length. The speaker of the first poem demonstrates this after the opening apostrophe by saying, “It, I, is always empty. Or I-it, must make emptier than need be.” Then, just a few lines further on, “How to desire an end to desiring.” There is profound equivocation here in this call to A. It both desires A. and wishes for an end to this desire. It is empty of A. but must become emptier. It marks the distance of the absent one precisely to keep that distance, to keep the absent one at a certain remove.The rest of the volume works in much the same way, though not always directly in the mode of apostrophe. It holds at a distance this thing, A., that it both desires and wishes not to desire. “Namely A.,” Cheuk writes in poem [11], “I’ve diminished you / tho there is no excising you without excising me.” Then, later in the same poem, “I must fall in love / in my disappearing.” In these kinds of passages, the poetry of Deus et Machina explores what it means that A. has intoxicated its heart, covering its woes and becoming its only good, precisely by holding A. at a remove from itself. And in so doing, it suggests that moral thinking more generally involves exactly this gesture—the holding of “our only good” at arm’s length, in a way that simultaneously marks our desire for it and reveals its continued absence.

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Vocamus Press, a micro-press that publishes the literary culture of Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director at Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph. He has written a collection of poetry, short prose, and photography called Island Pieces, three chapbooks of poetry called CanCon, Trumped, and These My Streets, and an ongoing series of poetry broadsheets called Conversations with Viral Media. His criticism and poetry have appeared in places like The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.